Madeline walked the familiar path through the archives with her satchel close and her hood drawn low. The city outside had already begun its twilight bustle — merchants calling, bells tolling, carts rattling over cobbled streets — but in here, all was still.
She preferred it that way.
The Grand Archivist met her at the western alcove, where the banned texts were locked behind an iron gate. Her mentor. Her last true friend. Ithan Varrow.
He looked thinner than she remembered, though it had only been three months since they’d last spoken. His beard had grayed more around the edges, and his robes smelled faintly of cedar and old vellum. His eyes, however — sharp as glass, wary as a crow — had not dulled a bit.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” he said without turning.
“I brought you something,” she replied.
“I assume it’s illegal.”
“Likely.”
He turned then, and his brow furrowed when she handed him the sketch she’d made of the altar at Hollowby. He studied the rune of the crown, and the name beneath it.
After a long moment, he muttered, “By the Deep...”
“So, you know it,” Madeline said.
Ithan sighed. “I know of it. Every scholar does, though most pretend not to. It’s a fable. A death-song for the Sable Order.”
“That’s not a fable on that altar.”
He gave her a hard look. “Where did you find this?”
“In a chapel. The runes were burned into stone, Ithan. No chisel. No ink. Just ash and heat and—”
“—and madness,” he finished, folding the parchment. “You say there were survivors?”
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She nodded.
“And what did they say?”
“One word. The same as that one.”
“Saldrith.”
He hissed the name like it stung.
Madeline dropped her voice. “It’s a name from the deep histories, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than that. Or less, depending on who you ask.” Ithan turned toward the gate behind him and withdrew a heavy iron key from his sleeve. “Come. But quietly. If the wrong ears catch wind of this, the King’s Justiciars will do more than revoke your license.”
The iron gate groaned as it opened.
Inside was a room lit only by four oil lamps and a red-glassed lantern at its center. The shelves here were iron, not wood, and the air was colder — as though the stones had not seen sunlight in centuries. This was not the forbidden section the nobles whispered about. This was the one they denied existed.
Ithan pulled a scroll from the upper shelf and placed it reverently on the table. “This is The Song of the Hollow Throne. Copied from oral traditions in the east, before the Sable Order burned the temples and forbade the language. It is one of only two copies known to remain.”
“And the other?”
He tapped his chest. “Up here.”
Madeline leaned over the parchment, eyes scanning the spidery glyphs and the translated marginalia in Ithan’s hand.
“Seven thrones for seven lords,One crown for one above.Hollow is the throne of death,Hollow is the crown of love.”
“It’s a children’s rhyme,” she muttered.
Ithan shook his head. “That’s what they turned it into. But before that — it was a warning. The Hollow Crown was never a thing. It was a burden. A mantle passed through blood, through pain, through—”
“Sacrifice,” Madeline finished. “You think someone has taken it up again?”
“I think,” he said slowly, “someone is trying to open what the crown once sealed.”
Madeline went still. “The God-Who-Was.”
Ithan didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
They spent the next three hours cross-referencing names from the scroll — kings, knights, high priests — with the death records Madeline had brought from Hollowby and two nearby towns struck by plague in the last month. The pattern was faint, like ink watered down, but it was there.
A network of names. All tied to a forgotten rebellion. All snuffed out violently.
One in particular made Madeline pause: Tamsin Elryan.
“That’s my grandmother,” she whispered.
Ithan leaned over. “What was her rank?”
“None. She was a seamstress. Widowed during the Western March Rebellions.”
Ithan frowned. “She shouldn’t be on this list.”
“But she is.”
And beside her name, scrawled in another hand: Binder.
Madeline felt something cold uncurl in her stomach.
“You said the Hollow Crown was a burden,” she said slowly. “Passed by blood. What kind of burden?”
Ithan didn’t answer at first. He only closed the scroll, gently, as though afraid it might bite.
Then he looked up at her with eyes gone suddenly old.
“It’s the kind you don’t carry,” he said. “It carries you — until it’s done with you.”